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Highlighting the dark

WHEN, IN 2009, TORONTO author-illustrator Willow Dawson read that 500 lost fairy tales had been discovered in a German archive, she felt an immediate sense of intrigue and connection. Dating back 150 years, the stories were by Franz Xaver von Schönwerth, a contemporary of the Grimm Brothers, whose tales Dawson had grown up reading. “I decided that I really wanted to do something with [von Schönwerth’s stories] but didn’t know what it would look like at that time,” she says.